How it works: Visual pattern-matching games like Tetris (and Candy Crush Saga, Bejeweled, etc) are so visually absorbing, they prevent your brain from concentrating on what you saw, and therefore block your brain from forming long-term visual memories of the trauma. You will still be able to recall all of the details of what happened, but you are less likely to suffer unwanted flashbacks.

ONLY visual pattern-matching games like Tetris are expected to help. Other types of games (such as racing games or first-person shooters) are not likely to help, and some games (such as trivia quizzes) may even increase flashbacks.

The researchers successfully tested their theory in a laboratory setting — twice, and then again more recently in a follow-up study. Tetris DID prevent flashbacks after witnessing traumatic imagery. Tetris players also reported less trauma overall on a traumatic experience survey. But it’s much more difficult to test with real trauma in real-world situations. It’s unknown exactly how helpful this technique will be in different kinds of traumatic situations. However, the research to date suggests strong potential for significant benefit — and, in its favor, this technique is free, widely accessible, has no known side effects, and does not interfere with other forms of treatment or support.

WHO CAN THIS TECHNIQUE HELP?

If you or someone you love experiences or witness a trauma such as a motor vehicle accident, a physical injury, a rape, a physical assault, a violent crime, the loss of a pet, a workplace accident, the death of a loved one, this technique could help prevent flashbacks and nightmares.

These are terrible things to imagine happening, but if they do, this simple cognitive vaccine could prevent months or even years of suffering.

To make it easier to remember during a crisis, just think: “PLAY, don’t REPLAY.” Play a game, to avoid replaying the trauma over and over again in your mind. “PLAY, don’t REPLAY” is the stop-drop-and-roll of preventing PTSD.

Please SPREAD THE WORD: Share this page with as many people as possible — via Twitter, Facebook, or email.

This technique only works if you know about it before you experience or witness a trauma. That’s why we need to teach as many people as we can now, in case they need it one day in the future.

To make it easier to remember during a crisis, just think: “PLAY, not REPLAY.” Play a game, to avoid replaying the trauma over and over again in your mind. “PLAY, not REPLAY” is the stop-drop-and-roll of preventing PTSD.

Please remember: While there is evidence to suggest this technique can reduce the number and severity of flashbacks, this technique is NOT an alternative to other forms of support or treatment. Please continue to seek any and all medical, legal, psychological, and social support you may need.

How you can help prevent PTSD in the FUTURE:

SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE: If you or a loved one ever has the need to use this technique, please send an email to playnotreplay@gmail.com letting us know. We would love to ask you a few simple questions (such as what game you played, how soon after the trauma, and whether you experienced flashbacks or nightmares) so we can start to learn more about whether this technique works, and how much it helps, in real-world situations.

Questions we might be able to answer: How can this videogame “cognitive vaccine” be incorporated into first-response to traumas, in hospitals, schools, or police settings? Is it even possible for someone to focus attention on a videogame immediately after a traumatic event, or are some events so traumatic that concentrating on anything at all is nearly impossible? Does this technique help more with those who witness, but are not directly impacted by the trauma?

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For more information, reach out to Jane McGonigal, PhD @avantgame on Twitter.

Here is a helpful review of research on the ethics of researching trauma, and the impacts on participants of trauma research. “Trauma researchers are often those who are facilitating the telling of a story to a supportive audience for the first time. Finding a way to tell these stories well, to examine their meaning, and to promote the understanding necessary to prevent the further occurrence of trauma, is one purpose of trauma research. Implicit in this goal is the duty to perform the research with integrity and respect.”

This project is not associated with Oxford University, or their researchers. It is an independent effort. It is not affiliated with or supported by the makers of Tetris, or any other videogame company for that matter!

I’m a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here’s my special mission for this talk: I’m going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk.

Okay, some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That’s okay, because check it out — I have math to prove that it is possible. And it won’t make a lot of sense now. I’ll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: plus-7.68245837 minutes that will be my gift to you if I’m successful in my mission.

Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren’t going to have them anyway.

Now, because I’m a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TEDTalk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week as a planet playing video games.

Now, 21 billion hours, it’s a lot of time. It’s so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds? This idea is so pervasive — that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret — that I hear it literally everywhere I go.For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developer’s conference, turned around and said — and I quote — “I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time.”

Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I mean, I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don’t want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we’re on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games?

Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It’s true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that’s what I want to share with you today — the top five regrets of the dying.

Number one: I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I’d had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I’d lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me.

Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, I wish I’d spent more time playing video games, but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can’t help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill.

For example, I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I’d spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them.

I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends. Well, hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from [University of Michigan] showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren’t playing games together.

I wish I’d let myself be happier. Well, here I can’t help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness.

I wish I’d had the courage to express my true self. Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals.

I wish I’d led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me. Are games doing this yet? I’m not sure, so I’ve left a question mark, a Super Mario question mark.And we’re going to come back to this one.

But in the mean time, perhaps you’re wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it’s true, I’ve never worked in a hospice, I’ve never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die.Really wanting to die.

Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. Now the concussion didn’t heal properly, and after 30 days I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words — and I think you see where this is going — no reason to live.

Of course it’s meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite commonwith traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, Jane, you want to die. It said, you’re never going to get better. It said, the pain will never end.

And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days — and I will never forget this moment — I said, I am either going to kill myself or I’m going to turn this into a game.

Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game — and this is in the scientific literature — we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we’re more likely to reach out to others for help. And I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer.

Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister — I have an identical twin sister named Kelly — and tell her, I’m playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me. This was an easier way to ask for help.

She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces. We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once.

Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn’t a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms.That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering.

Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be “the slayer,” so I renamed the game SuperBetter.

And soon I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting “super better” facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn’s disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family. And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives.

Now at the time, I’m thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn’t worked for me, there’s no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there’s some science here too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that’s what was happening to us.

The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder. But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn’t doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives.

Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: My priorities have changed. I’m not afraid to do what makes me happy. I feel closer to my friends and family. I understand myself better. I know who I really am now. I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life. I’m better able to focus on my goals and dreams.

Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets.

But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right?

I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here’s what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don’t need a trauma to do it.

Now, I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I’d rather you experience them firsthand. I’d rather we all start building them up together right now. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to play a quick game together. This is where you earn those seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you.

So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds. Go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good. (Laughter)

Well done, everyone. Now that is worth plus-one physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. Now we know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That’s all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains.

Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93 … Go!

(Snapping)

Don’t give up.

(Snapping)

Don’t let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50.

(Laughter)

Nice. Wow. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that’s worth plus-one mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower.

So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Now because of the room we’re in, fate’s really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you’re inside, find a window and look out of it. If you’re outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for “baby [your favorite animal.]”

Now, you could do this on your phones, or you could just shout out some baby animals,I’m going to find some and put them on the screen for us. So, what do we want to see?Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let’s see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant. We’re clapping for that? That’s amazing.

All right, now what we’re just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel when we look at baby animals, when you need them most.

And here’s a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you’re facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It’s my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up.

All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone’s hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go!

(Chatting)

Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is plus-one social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends,your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better.

Here’s one more secret for you: Shaking someone’s hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that’s the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities.

(Laughter)

Okay, well you have successfully completed your four quests, so let’s see if I’ve successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life.And here’s where I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience — physical, mental, emotional and social — live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here’s where that math I showed you earlier comes in.

So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life to that by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you’re actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience,like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life.

Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them.

(Applause)

Yeah! Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission.How are you going to spend these seven and a half minutes of bonus life?

Well, here’s my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie’s wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right? So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you are going to boost your resilience, so you’re going to earn more minutes.

And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games.

I’m Jane McGonigal. I’m a game designer. I’ve been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games.

Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, “That’s a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world.” But actually, according to my research at The Institute For The Future, it’s actually the opposite is true.Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world’s most urgent problems.

In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I’ve calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that’s probably a bit of a counterintuitive idea, so I’ll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. (Laughter) No. I’m serious. I am.

Here’s why. This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species. (Laughter) Truly. This is a portrait by a photographer named Phil Toledano. He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. And this is a classic gaming emotion. Now, if you’re not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo.You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration,deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem.

If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. This is a gamer who is on the verge of something called an epic win. (Laughter) Oh, you’ve heard of that. OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination. And when you get there you are shocked to discover what you are truly capable of. That is an epic win. This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century — the face of someone who, against all odds is on the verge of an epic win.

Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. This is what I call the “I’m Not Good At Life” face, and this is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. This is actually me making the “I’m Not Good At Life” face. This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we’re better in games than we are in real life. And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games.

And I don’t mean just good as in successful, although that’s part of it. We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters, inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. And when we’re in game worlds I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment’s notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don’t feel that way. We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we’re playing games, they just don’t exist in games. So, that’s what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student.

What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can’t achieve everything? How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? So, I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds.

So, the first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. But not just any mission, it’s a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. Right? So, you can do it. They never give you a challenge that you can’t achieve. But it is on the verge of what you’re capable of. So, you have to try hard, but there’s no unemployment in World of Warcraft.There is no sitting around wringing your hands, there’s always something specific and important to be done. And there are also tons of collaborators. Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission.

That’s not something that we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertipsare tons of collaborators. And also there is this epic story, this inspiring story of why we’re there, and what we’re doing. And then we get all this positive feedback. You guys have heard of leveling up and plus-one strength, and plus-one intelligence. We don’t get that kind of constant feedback in real life. When I get off this stage I’m not going to have plus-one speaking, and plus-one crazy idea, plus-20 crazy idea. I don’t get that feedback in real life.

Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it’s so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time that we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. It’s just better than reality. So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth.Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It might sound like it’s a bad thing. But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. That was the first upright primate.

Okay, so when we talk about how much time we’re currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. But it’s also apt. Because it turns outthat by spending all this time playing games, we’re actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We are evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. This is true. I believe this.

So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.

So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers.” So, you would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of success. It’s based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we’re looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.

So, the big question is, “What exactly are gamers getting so good at?” Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. And in the next decade we’re going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. If you don’t know it already, this is coming. The game industry is developing consoles that are low energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers.

So, I’ve started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle,combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it is always worth trying, and trying now.Gamers don’t sit around. Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. There’s a lot of interesting research that shows that we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they’ve beaten us badly. And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, they’ll stay with the game until it’s over.

And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. Blissful productivity. I love it.You know there’s a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week, kind of a half-time job. It’s because we know, when we’re playing a game, that we’re actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they’re given the right work.

Finally: epic meaning. Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. Five million people use it every month. They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. They are building an epic story. They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft.

Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered, hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is that they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That’s the problem that I’m trying to solve.

There’s an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at whypeople are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. And he says, “We’re witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments.” And he’s an economist. So, he’s rational. And he says … (Laughter) Not like me — I’m a game designer; I’m exuberant. But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So, he says for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world more like a game.

So, I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. These are ancient dice, made out of sheep’s knuckles. Right? Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep’s knuckles. And these represent the first game equipmentdesigned by human beings. And if you’re familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia during a time of famine.

Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided that they had to do something crazy. People were suffering. People were fighting. It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat,and on the next day, everybody would play games. And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat.

And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famineby eating on one day and playing games on the next. Now, this is exactly, I think, how we’re using games today. We’re using games to escape real-world suffering. We’re using games to get away from everything that’s broken in the real environment, everything that’s not satisfying about real life, and we’re getting what we need from games.

But it doesn’t have to end there. This is really exciting. According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn’t getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilizationsomewhere else where they could thrive.

Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans,who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians.And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus’ crazy story is actually true.And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years that could have explained the famine. So, this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way.

Okay, we can do that. We’ve been playing Warcraft since 1994. That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. That was 16 years ago. They played dice games for 18 years, we’ve been playing Warcraft for 16 years. I say we are ready for our own epic game. Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that’s where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. Let’s get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems.

Now, I know you’re asking, “How are we going to solve real world problems in games?” Well, that’s what I have devoted my work to over the past few years, at The Institute For The Future. We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. We do not want to try to predict the future.What we want to do is make the future. We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win.

I’m just going to very briefly show you three games that I’ve made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. So, this is World Without Oil. We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real, and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, you tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news, videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what’s not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there is rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos.

We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we’ve tracked them for the three years since. And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live just because it’s good for the world, or because we’re supposed to.But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, “We’ve run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive,” most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game.

So, for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher: bigger problem than just peak oil. We did a game called Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. We asked people to come online almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team — you’ve got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. (Laughter)

But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, “Everybody’s on the dream team, and it’s your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net.” We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google “Superstruct,” and see.

So, finally, the last game, we’re launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game you will be certified by the World Bank Institute, as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. We’ve got a graphic novel, we’ve got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking,sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world.

So, I’m going to wrap up now. I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next?We’ve got all these amazing gamers, we’ve got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope that you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning.

I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. And that’s my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want.So, I say: Let the world-changing games begin. Thank you. (Applause)

Curious for more breakthrough research? Join SuperBetter.com (it’s free) and explore the science in your Secret Lab! Watch videos, listen to mini-podcasts, or read our “level up” research summaries. And whenever you want to investigate further, you can access the original research yourself! We’ve curated more than 100 of our favorite scientific studies for you, on everything from “Lazy Exercise” to “The Science of Mindfulness”.

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(TIP: The studies here are presented in the order they appear in the talks, so you can follow along with the online podcasts, videos or slides!)